Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Salesforce-owned customer support app Desk.com has added a new “achievements” feature to motivate service representatives to earn badges as they help more people.

Desk.com launched in January and competes with Zendesk and TalkDesk to give small and medium-sized companies cloud-based customer support management. With the super simple desktop and mobile apps, business can field questions and issues through phone, email, web, Twitter, Facebook, and other channels. While Desk.com wont reveal its number of customers, notable companies including Square, Spotify, Rdio, Pandora, Vimeo, Grooveshark, and Bonobos use the service.

The new achievements feature essentially is an automated system that rewards service reps for various accomplishments. Some examples are helping a certain number of customers, resolving a case in less than a minute, responding to certain number of emails, or helping a customer on the weekend. The new badges will go live for all Desk.com users on Thursday.

“This is about boosting customer happiness,” Alex Bard told VentureBeat. “It’s also a good tool to add greater productivity.”

Bard said that the company will look at adding further achievements, especially looking at ways to have satisfied customers give badges and positive feedback to the agents that helped them through a problem. He also likes the idea of making it so a boss that oversees service reps can reward them with badges too.

“This is our first foray into this, so this is just the tip of the iceberg,” Bard said.

Check out the 16 new Desk.com achievements below:

Call center photo via dotshock/Shutterstock

Foursquare users can obtain expertise badges by checking in multiple times to several different venues in the same category. For instance, if you check in to five different pizza places in the same area, you’d get an expertise badge for eating pizza. Those badges are then displayed in a user’s trophy case on their profile.

To improve upon the aforementioned concept above, Foursquare is now adding levels to those particular badges, which can increase based on check-in activity. Users can reach the first level by either checking in to three unique places in a single category or checking in to the same place five times. The second and subsequently higher levels can be achieved by checking in to five more unique venues within the same category.

Users can check their badge trophy cases today to see what level they’re currently at, as well as what they need to do to advance to the following badge level.

The point of the new badge functionality is to reward users for higher degrees of exploration while making their trophy cases mirror their real life expertise, the company said in a blog post announcing the badge update. “Your actions within foursquare should help you build a true, rich representation of your expertise about the things you love to do,” the company wrote.

The company said it plans to add the leveling functionality to other aspects of the site, such as the ability to level up when multiple people complete a Tip you’ve left at a particular venue. For the time being, Foursquare has added three new expertise badges to better reflect a person’s eating habits: Herbivore (for vegan/vegetarians), Hot Tamale (for those who love Mexican food), and Bento (for sushi lovers).

The startup offers widgets and APIs to publishers looking to add game mechanics such as badges and rewards to their sites. Publishers can add existing widgets or create a more personalized experience through working with Badgeville’s APIs to reward visitors for performing various actions on their site — for example, leaving a comment.

CEO Kris Duggan says offering social rewards helps increase reader engagement and build a community. “It’s not about pageviews anymore,” he told us when we spoke to him in September, also mentioning that the company is on track to reach $1 million in revenue by the end of this year.

Since launching at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in September where it won the audience choice award, Badgeville has garnered an impressive amount of traction. It has partnered with publishers such as Comcast Sports, TechCrunch, Philly.com, The Next Web, and Blackbook.

Its competitors include BigDoor, which raised $5.47 million last month.

Previously, Badgeville raised $250,000 as part of an angel round. Investors in this first institutional round include Felix Investments, and senior executives from eBay, Paypal, Chegg, Shopping.com, Drugstore.com, Palantir, and Warner Music.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Foursquare announced a new partnership today, hinting at how the startup’s ambitions extend beyond location check-ins.

The new partnership is with Runkeeper, a mobile application for tracking your running and jogging activity. When users connect their accounts, they can earn Foursquare badges for their activity in Runkeeper, for example earning a Marathon badge when they run a marathon. Foursquare says this is “the first badge you unlock by doing something, not just checking in.” That also means the badges won’t really be connected to your location, at least not in the way Foursquare’s other badges are — you earn a Gym Rat badge by going to the gym, while you earn Runkeeper badges by running anywhere.

Foursquare says it’s pursuing similar deals with “a handful of carefully selected partners.” This seems like a smart way to keep users connected to Foursquare even if they’re not using the app.

And these partnerships should also help Foursquare keep its badge concept fresh. When I first started using the app, I seemed to earn a new badge every couple of days as a reward for checking in at different locations. I still use Foursquare, but I haven’t earned a new badge in months, which suggests that the current badge system has limitations. (Or maybe I’m just doing it wrong.)

I’m very curious to see who the other partners are, and if, like Runkeeper, they’re only loosely connected to location. If these initial partnerships are a hit, Foursquare could expand beyond location in a more ambitious way. (The latest update to the Foursquare app, version 2.0, also suggests the company has become more interested in activities and activity recommendations.) That could mean trouble for less-established startups that are built around the check-in and badge concepts that Foursquare popularized — you know, the kind of company that describes itself as (for example) “Foursquare for TV.”

Now, I think that a lot of these startups (including Miso, the Foursquare for TV app that I mentioned above) have smart ideas about how to take Foursquare’s basic concepts into new areas. But as Foursquare expands its activity beyond location check-ins, it might turn out that the “Foursquare for X” is actually Foursquare itself.

Foursquare

With CNN, Foursquare is releasing two new World Cup badges: South Africa Explorer and Super Fan. To get the first, you have to visit South Africa to attend the World Cup and check in, or announce your location to your friends, on Foursquare. For the rest of the world, you can earn the Super Fan badge by checking in at World Cup viewing parties. Over 100 venues will be seeded with tips from CNN employees, Mashable reports.

During Internet Week in New York, Foursquare will also be testing some other uses for badges. By checking into the Internet Week headquarters during the day, users will receive a badge that gets them VIP access to parties. Other badges will earn users bottles of wine signed by Wine Library TV’s Gary Vaynerchuk. Foursquare hopes to offer more reward-based options like these in the future.

Crowley also chatted a bit about his philosophy of badges. In response to a user-submitted question about small businesses creating badges of their own, he mentioned that the company is still guarding them closely — he’s worried that too many available badges may dilute their value to users.

In regards to downtime issues, Foursquare had all of its engineers focus on scaling improvements for the past two weeks, forgoing work on new features. Crowley said that this is something that may continue to happen on a semi-regular basis, particularly since Foursquare’s user base is increasing so quickly. The site surpassed 1.5 million users last week, and is approaching 1.6 million this week. Check-ins are increasing by 50,000 a week.